James Franco Unveils Slinky Video For Daddy's Crime

James Franco is still channeling all those Renaissance Men from - well, the Renaissance. The actor, director, artist, student, musician, model, writer (have I forgotten anything?) hit the Toronto International Film Festival last month promoting his latest in Spring Breakers by director Harmony Korine, in which he plays a low-brow thug. But now it's late September and it's time to roll out with something else. This time, it's a music video with his newly launched musical project, Daddy, with artist Tim O'Keefe.
Motown superstar Smokey Robinson joins in on vocals in the sultry single, Crime, which debuted today via Spin Magazine. Franco met the singer in a perfect alignment of coincidences that only a man with outsized good karma can have.

He told Spin:

"I had been listening to Motown everyday, talking to Tim O'Keefe about our project. He recommended a documentary about the history of Motown. So I watched the doc in the car on the way to the airport in RI one night, most of the doc was about Smokey. [Then] on the plane to L.A. I slept the whole way and when we landed I woke up with a smiling face standing over me. He said, 'Hey, I'm a big fan.' I just stared. 'It's Smokey,' he said. If Smokey Robinson was a fan of mine I wasn't going to let him get away. Six months later after Tim and I had written the songs I called Smokey from Detroit and asked him to sing on one of the songs and he said sure."

Franco said that his experience in Spring Breakers, which also stars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine, influenced his Daddy project. His co-stars are featured on the cover art of the Daddy EP. And in one scene in the feature, his character, Dangeruss, sings to hundreds of people on the beach."That showed me how different singing to an audience is than acting in a scene before an audience," he said. "When you sing you are connecting directly to the audience; when you act in a scene you are engulfed in the imaginary world and you are connected to the other performers."